These are questions that inevitably come up when you start thinking about how to connect the dots between what you’re selling and who you’re trying to reach.

Whether you've got nothing but a business idea or want to pivot your existing brand, here's what you need to know about building a strong brand identity for your business.

What exactly is a “brand”?

A brand isn’t just a recognizable name and logo that distinguishes you in a crowded market.

Your brand is how people perceive you wherever they interact with your business—both the impressions you can control and the ones you can't.

When you think about it, people have brands too. We each have a name, a face, a style, a way of communicating, different impressions we make on different people, and what they say about us when we’re not in the room.

Likewise, businesses have names, products, logos, colors, fonts, voices, and reputations to manage that make up who they are and affect how they’re perceived.

You can't build a brand without being consistent and maintaining that consistency as you extend your brand to every part of your business. But it all starts with establishing what that consistency is going to look like and the feeling you want it to evoke.

How to Build a Brand

Building your own brand essentially boils down to 7 steps:

Research your target audience and your competitors.

Pick your focus and personality.

Choose your business name.

Write your slogan.

Choose the look of your brand (colors and font).

Design your logo.

Apply your branding across your business and evolve it as you grow.

While you might revisit some steps as you pivot your brand, it's important that you consider each aspect as you shape your brand identity.

Let’s start with laying the groundwork to inform the way you go about building your brand.

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Who your top of mind competitors are—the brands that are established and known in the market.

How your customers speak and what they talk about—the interests they have and the language they express them in.

It’s important to have a handle on this before moving forward as it will inform what your brand should focus on and how it can position itself apart from competitors.

2. Define your brand’s focus and personality

Your brand can’t be everything to everyone, especially at the start.

It’s important to find your focus and let that inform all the other parts of your brand as you build it.

Here are some questions and branding exercises to get you thinking about the focus and tone of your brand.

What's your positioning statement?

A positioning statement is one or two lines that stake your claim in the market. This isn't necessarily something you put on your website or business card—it's just to help you answer the right questions about your brand.

Your positioning statement should go something like...

We offer [PRODUCT/SERVICE] for [TARGET MARKET] to [VALUE PROPOSITION].

Unlike [THE ALTERNATIVE], we [KEY DIFFERENTIATOR].

e.g. We offer water bottles for hikers to stay hydrated while reducing their carbon footprint. Unlike other water bottle brands, we plant a tree for every bottle you buy.

Your unique value proposition is the one thing you're competing on. Find it, go in on it, and make it a part of your brand's messaging.

Alternatively, if the company you want to start has a cause at its core (e.g. if you're starting a social enterprise), you can also write this out as a mission statement that makes a clear promise to your customers or to the world.

What words would you associate with your brand?

One way to look at your brand is as if it was a person. What would he or she be like? What kind of personality would your customers be attracted to?

This will help inform your voice on social media and the tone of all your creative, both visual and written.

A fun and useful branding exercise is to pitch 3-5 adjectives that describe the type of brand that might resonate with your audience. I compiled this list of traits to help you get started.

What metaphors or concepts describe your brand?

Thinking about your brand as a metaphor or personifying it can help you identify the individual qualities you want it to have.

This can be a vehicle, an animal, a celebrity, a sports team, anything—as long as it has a prominent reputation in your mind that summons the sort of vibe you want your brand to give off.

For example, if I wanted to create a brand targeting entrepreneurs I might choose to use the raccoon as a starting point: They’re scrappy survivors that will do anything to thrive.

If your brand was an animal, what animal would it be and why is it like that animal to you?

3. Choose a business name

“A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet. But Nike by another name would be seen on fewer feet.”

Shakespeare (sort of)

What's in a name? Depending on the kind of business you want to start, you can make the case that your name matters very little or it matters a lot.

As we've said before, a brand is so more than a name. The personality, actions, and reputation of your brand are really what give the name meaning in the market.

But as a business owner, your company's name is probably one of the first big commitments you have to make. It’ll impact your logo, your domain, your marketing, and trademark registration if you decide to go that route (it's harder to trademark generic brand names that literally describe what you sell).

Ideally, you want a business name that’s hard to imitate and even harder to confuse with existing players in the market. If you have any plans to expand the product lines you offer down the road, consider keeping your business name broad so that it's easier to pivot than if you chose a brand name based on your product category.

You can use our Business Name Generator to brainstorm some names, or try one (or a combination) of the following approaches:

Make up a word like Pepsi.

Reframe an unrelated word likeApple for computers.

Use a suggestive word or metaphor likeBuffer.

Describe it literally (caution: easy to imitate) like The Shoe Company

Alter a word by removing letters, adding letters, or using Latin endings likeTumblr (Tumbler) or Activia.

Use the initials of a longer name like HBO (Home Box Office)

Combine two words: Pinterest (pin interest) or Facebook (Face + Book)

Turn a string of words into an acronym: BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke)

Since your brand name will also affect the domain/URL of your website, be sure to shop around to see what’s available before you decide. Check out our guide to choosing a good business name.

It's also a good idea to run your name by a focus group of close people, if for no other reason than to make sure it doesn't have an unintended meaning or is too similar to something else that you might've missed.

4. Pick your brand’s colors and fonts

Once you've got a name down, you'll need to think about how you'll visually represent your brand, namely your colors and typography. This will come in handy when you start to build your website.

Choosing your colors

Colors don't just define the look of your brand; they also convey the feeling you want to communicate and help you make it consistent across your entire brand. You'll want to choose colors that differentiate you from direct competitors to avoid confusing consumers.

Color psychology isn't an exact science, but it does help to inform the choices you make, especially when it comes to the color you choose for your logo.

This infographic offers a nice overview of the emotions and associations that different colors generally evoke.

It’s important to consider how legible white and black text will be over your colour palette, and how colored text might look over white and black backgrounds. Try using a tool like Coolors to brainstorm colors that work together, grab the hex codes to keep handy, and sift through different shades to find the ones you like.

Choosing your fonts

At this point, it's also good to look at fonts you might want to use on your website.

Pick two fonts at most to avoid unnecessarily confusing visitors: one for headings and one for body text (this doesn't include the font you might use in your logo).

You can use Font Pair to browse from a wide selection of fonts that go well together and download them if necessary.

For inspiration, use Stylify.me on your favorite websites to see their visual style at a glance.

5. Write a slogan

A catchy slogan is a nice-to-have asset—something brief and descriptive that you can put in your Twitter bio, website headline, business card, and anywhere else where you've got very few words to make a big impact.

A good slogan is short, catchy, and makes a strong impression. Here are some ways to approach writing a slogan of your own:

Stake your claim: Death Wish Coffee—"The World's Strongest Coffee"

Make it a Metaphor:Redbull—"Redbull gives you wings."

Adopt your customers’ attitude: Nike—"Just do it."

Leverage labels: Cards Against Humanity—"A party game for horrible people".

Write a rhyme: Folgers Coffee: "The best part of wakin' up is Folgers in your cup."

Describe it literally: Aritzia—"Women's fashion boutique"

Try our Slogan Maker to brainstorm some ideas or play off of your positioning statement to generate some potential one-liners to describe your business.

6. Design your logo

A logo is probably one of the first things that come to mind when you think about building a brand. And for good reason. It's the face of your company after all, and could potentially be everywhere that your brand exists.

Ideally, you'll want a logo that's unique, identifiable, and that's scalable to work at all sizes (which is often overlooked).

Consider all the places where your brand's logo needs to exist, from your website to your Facebook Page's profile picture to even the little "favicons" you see in your current browser tab.

If you have a text logo as your Instagram avatar, for example, it'll be almost impossible to read. To make your life easier, get a square version of your logo that has an icon element that remains recognizable even at smaller sizes.

Notice how the Walmart logo has both the "sparks" icon and the wordmark, which can be used separately.

The following are some of the different logo types you can choose to help you communicate with designers and find a style that makes sense for your brand. Keep the colors and fonts you chose in mind to make sure they work together with your logo to convey your brand.

Abstract: Google Chrome

An abstract logo has no explicit meaning. It’s just a shape and colors that you can't easily tie back to anything in the real world.

The benefit of an abstract logo is that it has no innate meaning—you can make this up yourself and bring it to life in your customers' minds.

Mascot: Wendy’s

Mascot logos are often represented by the face of a character. They may humanize your brand, but be aware that they are an antiquated style now and only recommended in certain contexts (e.g. you’re deliberately going for a retro look).

Emblem: Starbucks

Emblem logos are often circular and combine text with an emblem for a bold and regal look. If the design is too complicated, however, they can lose their impact when you shrink them down. But done right, they can make for a memorable style of logo.

Lettermark: IBM

Lettermark logos turn the initials of your full business name into a logo. If you chose a business name with 3 or more words, this might be a style you'd want to consider, especially if the initialism is catchy.

Icon: Twitter

An icon logo is your brand represented as a visual metaphor. Unlike an abstract logo, an icon logo suggests something about the product (Twitter's bird is suggestive of the frequent short "tweets" on the platform).

As an unestablished brand, you should stay away from using an icon logo by itself. However, if you're not sure about the kind of logo you want, pairing an icon logo with a wordmark is usually a safe bet.

Wordmark: Facebook

Wordmark logos turn your brand name, colors, and font into a visual identity. The problem with wordmarks is that they're often hard to create in a scalable square design and easily lose their legibility when shrunk.

However, you can fix this problem by simply getting an accompanying icon logo or turning the first letter of the wordmark into a separate-but-connected logo, like what Facebook does with the F.

Combination: McDonald's

Because of the limitations that exist for each logo type, many logos are a combination of styles.

As a new business, and you don't need to choose an icon over a wordmark when you can get the best of both. This makes it easier to satisfy the condition of creating a scalable logo while still putting your brand name front and center. McDonalds, for example, can use their iconic golden arches wherever the full wordmark doesn't fit.

Unless you've got design chops of your own, you'll probably be delegating the creation of your logo. You can outsource it for a low cost on Fiverr or run a logo contest on 99Designs.

7. Apply, extend, and evolve your brand as you grow

Building a brand doesn't stop with creating a logo or slogan. Your brand needs to exist and remain consistent wherever your customers interact with you, from the theme you choose for your website to the marketing you do to customer service to the way you package and ship your products.

You'll continue to shape and evolve your brand as you expose more customers to it and learn more about who they are and how to speak to them.

It's important to appreciate that you will never have 100% control over how people perceive your brand.

You can tug customers in the right direction, make a great first impression, and manage your reputation, but you can’t control the individual perceptions that exists in each person's mind (say, if they had a bad customer service experience).

All you can do is put your best foot forward at every turn and try to resonate with your core audience. But hopefully, at this point, you have the tools, knowledge, and resources to start.

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About the author

Braveen Kumar

Braveen Kumar is part of the content team at Shopify where he develops resources to help aspiring entrepreneurs start and grow their own businesses.